Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have imagined a quick and easy victory when he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, even smugly calling it a “special military operation.” The victory still hasn’t materialized, and the costs of the war continue to mount. So do its potential consequences. Some wars change the world, and history illuminates how the Russia-Ukraine War might do so.
This war has gone on almost as long as World War I and is already of longer duration than the war between Nazi Germany and the USSR. Like World War I’s Western Front, after initial rapid Russian advance and successful Ukrainian counterattack, Russia’s war on Ukraine has become a prolonged, bloody, near-stalemate, with the Russians advancing slowly, at great cost, and without breakthroughs. (The New York Times, among others, has reported the imminent Russian capture of Pokrovsk since the late summer of 2024.) Also like World War I, the Russia-Ukraine War has introduced new military technology — especially drones — that has transformed battlefield tactics, upended assumptions about the dominance of tanks and other armored vehicles, and forced the Russian Black Sea Fleet to hide even though Ukraine has no navy. Those changes in technology and tactics are just beginning to filter through militaries in Europe, the United States, and Asia, and they won’t be rolled back.
At the start of World War I, the combatants believed that war would be short and result in adjustments to the existing power arrangements and not in their overthrow. But as the war continued, its consequences grew. That war was transformational. The United States entered World War I in 1917 and its power was decisive. Germany plus its two allied empires — Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman — collapsed. New or renewed countries sprang up in their place. Weakened winners France and Britain never recovered their pre-war power. In two of the war’s losers, Germany and Russia, totalitarian leaders emerged from post-war chaos and set out to regain their empires, setting off another World War in which, again, U.S. power was decisive.
Putin’s war against Ukraine is likewise a war to restore Russia’s empire, his attempt to reverse the consequences of the Soviet collapse in 1989-1991, just as Stalin sought to reverse the consequences of Tsarist Russia’s collapse in 1917.
Risking the Next Wars of Empire
A victory for Russia in its current assault on Ukraine — meaning its subjugation of Ukraine by annexing part of the country and reducing the rest to satellite status — would lead to Russia’s next wars of empire. Moldova, Armenia, or Kazakhstan, non-NATO members, are possible early targets. Victory over Ukraine would also boost Kremlin efforts to re-dominate NATO’s Eastern tier of nations — with Ukraine defeated, Putin could intensify Russia’s ongoing attacks on European countries, seeking to intimidate Europe’s largest powers while working to strengthen far-right, pro-Russian political parties in some of them, and taking steps to isolate Europe’s more vulnerable countries closer to Russia from the West. Putin especially covets Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, whose independence movements in 1990 and 1991 helped bring down the Soviet empire. The Kremlin could do all this while courting the United States, promising all manner of business deals to the transactionally minded Trump team, with its large dose of skepticism about alliance with Europe, in exchange for U.S. indifference to European security when the chips were down. Russia, weaker but determined, could succeed where the USSR never did, destroying the transatlantic alliance and emerging as a dominant power in and over Europe.
History offers cautionary tales — something like this dark scenario has occurred before. After World War I, the United States retreated from its brief foray into world leadership toward what has been termed isolationism but is perhaps better understood as transactional unilateralism. It didn’t come from nowhere. Large parts of American society on both the left and right were bitter about involvement in World War I, believing that France and Britain had tricked the United States into war, and skeptical about President Woodrow Wilson’s ambition to replace the system of competing European empires with a first-sketch of a rules-based international order that favored democracy. Instead, successive U.S administrations preferred a business-first approach of hard interests and distance from European security that President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not reverse in time. The result was catastrophic: a second World War that might not have occurred had the United States remained engaged in European security.
Large parts of the Trump administration and some Americans are of a similar mind: bitter about the lengthy and frustrating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, skeptical about U.S. leadership of and even the value of a rules-based order, and chilly toward Europe. Putin knows this and may be counting on it. The results could be similarly catastrophic.
Russia Could Lose
But Russia has not won in Ukraine and does not appear to be close to winning. Given sufficient effort by the United States and its European allies, it could lose. That loss would bring profound benefits not just to Ukraine but to Europe and the United States. A Russian strategic defeat in Ukraine and failure of its efforts to reconstitute the Russian Empire are achievable.
Ukrainian resistance — its social resilience in the face of years of hardship and its military skill in the face of a larger foe — have exceeded U.S. and most European expectations. Ukraine’s skill in development of UAVs (drones on land and in the sea and in the air) is world class, and its innovation in production of cutting-edge military technology has left it less — rather than more — dependent on U.S. and European military technology, although that assistance remains important to its war effort. Ukraine has had persistent problems with military manpower, and many Ukrainian men have fled the country or are otherwise avoiding military service. But these problems have not led to Russian breakthroughs on the battlefield, and the Russians appear to have their own manpower problems, as Putin has not attempted to mobilize the young men of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
For many years, the Kremlin could count on European hesitation and divisions in the face of Russian aggression. Germany for years clung to a policy of getting along with Russia and dismissed the prescient warnings of Russian aggression coming from the Poles, Baltic states, and others with better knowledge of Russia. No longer. German national security and intelligence officials now speak openly of Russian aggression, including that directed against them, and acknowledge (mostly in private) that the Poles and Balts were right about Russia all along. The center of gravity of European thinking about Russia has shifted, and mainstream opinion now regards the Kremlin as adversarial and threatening. For the first time in decades, and possibly ever, Europe’s general views of Russia are at least as dark, and possibly darker, than some in the current U.S. administration.
As a result of this new threat perception of Russia, supplemented by U.S. pressure and European concern about President Donald Trump’s reliability as an ally, Europe is rearming. The finances for this remain fraught, and translation of new political will into deployable forces will take time. But the new threat perception about Russia has already propelled the French/British-led “Coalition of the Willing” to consider placing military forces inside Ukraine following a ceasefire to act as a deterrent, with U.S. military support such as intelligence and possibly more, to prevent a resumption of Russian aggression. While still provisional, this offer represents a radical departure from one-time European strategic indifference about Ukraine, as shown at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, when France and Germany blocked offering Ukraine a NATO Membership Action Plan largely on the grounds that it would be provocative to Moscow.
While Ukraine remains resilient and Europe rearms, Russia’s economy is slowly deteriorating. It is not on the verge of collapse, but like the Soviet economy in the 1980s, it is sacrificing development for the sake of military production. And, like the Soviet economy in its terminal decade, its revenue from energy exports is shrinking, partly under pressure of economic measures taken by the United States and the EU.
The framework of a durable end to the Russia-Ukraine War already exists: its core would consist of a ceasefire (a ceasefire in place would be simplest and thus more durable) and security arrangements for Ukraine. It would not be a just peace: that would require Russian withdrawal from all occupied Ukrainian territory. But a peace that includes roughly 80 percent of Ukraine remaining free and secure, able to recover from the war’s destruction and then prosper, would be a strategic victory for Ukraine, even if a bitter one, that would leave most of the country sovereign and able to join the European Union.
The Need for Pressure on Putin
The Kremlin still refuses to negotiate an end to the war on any terms other than its victory. Its current demands include Ukrainian withdrawal from all of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, including territory that Russia has been unable to take in four years of war. Despite occasional assertions by U.S. negotiator Steve Witkoff that this territorial demand is the last remaining issue in the peace talks, Russia has also repeatedly demanded regime change in Kyiv, with the current government replaced by one friendly to Moscow, a demand that recalls Stalin’s demand in 1945 that the free Polish government be replaced by one friendly to Moscow, i.e., a puppet government.
The Kremlin’s stubbornness reflects Russia’s war aims. Putin went to war not to seize this or that Ukrainian province, but to establish Russia’s dominance over all of Ukraine. He has been clear about his aims and his nationalist argument for them. He can be expected to maintain his maximal position until he meets with pressure to change it.
The United States and Europe have at hand the means to exert such pressure. They can seize more Russian ghost fleet oil tankers, depriving Russia of even more revenue; impose secondary sanctions on third-country purchasers of Russian oil and gas; maintain the cutoff of Starlink to the Russian military and extend cutoffs of it and other high-tech services to Russia; increase military and intelligence support for Ukraine, including for attacks on Russian oil and military infrastructure; and increase their own cyber and other attacks on Russia as long as Russia is attacking NATO countries. And Trump could make clear, at last, that he will no longer tolerate Putin’s stalling on negotiations but will intensify pressure until Russia accepts a ceasefire in place that will be followed by security support for Ukraine, including the presence of European forces in the country with U.S. backup, including with military assets such as air power.
Putin may resist ending the war at all, and he has his reasons: For him to do so on terms short of Russian victory could discredit and shake his regime. Russia lost many wars in the 19th and 20th century: the Crimean War; the Russo-Japanese War; World War I, when Germany defeated it and only American entry into the War saved Russia from German domination; and the Afghanistan War. Each lost war was followed by either domestic reform or domestic upheaval. Sometimes both.
An Empire-Ending War?
Big wars have big consequences, and Russia’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine has become a big war. Like World War I, it could be empire-ending.
Russia’s loss in Ukraine could discredit Putinism and end his efforts to restore the empire through war and aggression. And maybe more than that: if Russia’s imperial project fails in Ukraine, it may fail altogether and, perhaps, bring another chance for Russia to explore a future with less repression at home and less hostility to its neighbors. Many might dismiss this as a hopeless aspiration. But EU Commissioner for Defense Andrius Kubilius, who is a former prime minister of Lithuania and a veteran of Lithuania’s independence and democracy movement Sajudis, and so is hardly naïve about Russia, has held that Russia does have democratic potential and that the way to realize it is through defeat in its war against Ukraine.
Regime change in Russia is not and should not be the policy objective of the United States or Europe. Such an objective with Russia means a lot of responsibility with little ability to steer events. But it nevertheless may be the result of the United States and Europe backing Ukraine’s just war of national survival. Many in the Trump administration regard Ukraine’s national cause with indifference and think that U.S. support for a rules-based international order that favors democracy is a waste, empty words, or inimical to hard U.S. interests. Some seem to prefer an international system based on great powers being allowed to control their “spheres of interest,” something like the pre-World War I international system of competing empires that ended so badly.
But Ukraine’s success and the failure of Russia’s aggressive war would bring solid and serious benefits to the United States across the globe: it would show other adversarial powers, especially China, that the West is not as weak as they supposed; that wars of conquest that were supposed to be easy can end badly for the aggressor; that the United States and Europe, despite differences and much noise between them, can prevail when they back a country defending itself against a predatory power.
Trump and his administration may not have a lot of interest in the U.S. strategy of advancing a free world. But if they press Russia, they stand to advance both U.S. national interests and the power of the free world against its adversaries. And President Trump could fairly take the win.
– Ambassador Daniel Fried, Published courtesy of Just Security.
